The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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Sir George Yeardley and Sir Francis Wyatt both held the office of
governor twice, and with good repute; in 1630, Sir John Harvey succeeded
the former. He was the champion of monopolists; he would divide the land
among a few, and keep the rest in subjection. He fought with the
legislature from the first; he could not wring their rights from them, but
he distressed and irritated the colony, levying arbitrary fines, and
browbeating all and sundry with the brutality of an ungoverned temper. His
chief patron was Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, and therefore
disfavored by the Protestant colony, who would not suffer him to plant in
their domain. He bought a patent authorizing him to establish a colony in
the northern part of Virginia, which was afterward called Maryland, being
cut off from the older colony; and this diminution of their territory much
displeased the Virginians. But Harvey supported him throughout; and
permitted mass to be said in Virginia. He likewise prevented the settlers
from carrying on the border warfare with the Indians, lest it should
disturb his perquisites from the fur trade. Violent scenes took place in
the hall of assembly, and hard words were given and exchanged; the
planters were men of hot passions, and the conduct of the governor became
intolerable to them. Matters came to a head during the last week in April
of 1635. An unauthorized gathering in York complained of an unjust tax and
of other malfeasances; whereupon Harvey cried mutiny, and had the leaders
arrested. But the boot was on the other leg. Several members of council,
with a company of musketeers at their back, came to his house; Matthews,
with whom the governor had lately had a fierce quarrel, and the other
planters, tramped into the broad hall of the dwelling, with swords in
their hands and threatening looks, and confronted him. John Utie brought
down his hand with staggering force on his shoulder, exclaiming, "I arrest
you for treason!" "How, for treason?" queried the frightened governor.
"You have betrayed our forts to our enemies of Maryland," replied several
stern voices. Harvey glanced from one to another; in the background were
the musketeers; plainly this was no time for trifling. He offered to do
whatever they demanded. They required the release of prisoners, which was
immediately done, and bade him prepare to answer before the assembly. They
would listen to no arguments and no excuses; he was told by Matthews, with
a menacing look, that the people would have none of him. "You intend no
less than the subversion of Maryland," protested Harvey; but he promised
to return to England, and John West, who had already acted as ad-interim
governor while Harvey was on his way to Virginia, was at once elected in
his place.

This incident showed of what stuff the Virginians were made. It was an
early breaking-out of the American spirit, which would never brook
tyranny. In offering violence to the king's governor they imperiled their
own lives; but their blood was up, and they heeded no danger. When Harvey
presented himself before Charles at the privy council, his majesty
remarked that he must be sent back at all hazards, because the sending him
to England had been an assumption on the colonists' part of regal power;
and, tobacco or no tobacco, the line must be drawn there. If the charges
against him were sustained, he might stay but a day; if not, his term
should be extended beyond the original commission. A new commission was
given him, and back he went; but this shuttlecock experience seems to have
quelled his spirit, and we hear no more of quarrels with the Virginia
council. Wyatt relieved him in 1639; and in 1642 came Sir William
Berkeley. This man, who was born about the beginning of the century, was
twice governor; his present term, lasting ten years, was followed by a
nine years' interval; reappointed again in 1660, he was in power when the
rebellion broke out which was led by Nathaniel Bacon. Little is known of
him outside of his American record; in his first term, under Charles I.,
he acted simply as the creature of that monarch, and aroused no special
animosities on his own account: during the reign of Cromwell, he
disappeared; but when Charles II. ascended the throne, Berkeley, though
then an old man, was thought to be fitted by his previous experience for
the Virginia post, and was returned thither. But years seemed to have
soured his disposition, and lessened his prudence, and, as we shall see,
his bloodthirsty conduct after Bacon's death was the occasion of his
recall in disgrace; and he died, like Andros more than half a century
later, with the curse of a people on his grave.

But his first appearance was auspicious; he brought instructions designed
to increase the reign of law and order in the colony, without infringing
upon its existing liberties. Allegiance to God and the king were enjoined,
additional courts were provided for, traffic with the Indians was
regulated, annual assemblies, with a negative voice upon their acts by the
governor, were commanded. The only discordant note in the instructions
referred to the conditions of maritime trade, afterward known in history
as the Navigation Acts. The colony desired free trade, which, as it had no
manufactures, was obviously to its benefit. But it was as obviously to the
interest of the king that he alone should enjoy the right of controlling
all imports into the colony, and absorbing all its exports; and his
rulings were framed to secure that end. But for the present the Acts were
not carried into effect; and, on the other hand, the prospect was held out
that there should be no taxation except what was voted by the people
themselves; and their contention that they, who knew the conditions and
needs of their colonial existence, were better able to regulate it than
those at home, was allowed. By way of evincing their recognition of this
courtesy, the assembly passed among other laws, one against toleration of
any other than the episcopalian form of worship; and when Charles was
beheaded, in 1649, it voted to retain Berkeley in office. But when in the
next year, the fugitive son of the dead king undertook to issue a
commission confirming him in his place, Parliament intervened. Virginia
was brought to her bearings; and the Navigation Acts were brought up
again. Cromwell, no less than Charles, appreciated the advantages of a
monopoly.

Restrictions on commerce, first imposed by Spain, were first resisted by
the Dutch, with the result of rendering them the leading maritime power.
Cromwell wished to appropriate or share this advantage; but instead of
adopting the means employed for that purpose by the Dutch, he decreed that
none but English ships should trade with the English colonies, and that
foreign ships should bring to England only the products of their own
countries. The restriction did little harm to Virginia, so long as England
was able to take all her products, and to supply all her needs; but it
brought on war with Holland, in which both the moral and the naval
advantage was on the side of the Dutch. But England acquired a foothold in
the West Indies, and her policy was maintained. Virginia asked that she
should have representatives to act for her in England, and when a body of
commissioners was appointed to examine colonial questions, among them were
Richard Bennett and William Clairborne, both of them colonists, and men of
force and ability. In the sequel, the liberties of the colony were
enlarged, and Bennett was made governor by vote of the assembly itself,
which continued to elect governors during the ascendency of Parliament in
England. When Richard Cromwell, who had succeeded the great Protector,
resigned his office, the Virginia burgesses chose Sir William Berkeley to
rule over them, and he acknowledged their authority. Meanwhile the
Navigation Acts were so little enforced that smuggling was hardly illegal;
and, in 1658, the colonists actually invited foreign nations to deal with
them. This was the period of Virginia's greatest freedom before the
Revolution. The suffrage was in the hands of all taxpayers; in religious
matters, all restrictions except those against the Quakers were removed;
loyalists and roundheads mingled amicably in planting and legislation, and
the differences which had arrayed them against one another in England were
forgotten. The population increased to thirty thousand, and the
inhabitants developed among themselves an ardent patriotism. It is not
surprising. Their country was one of the richest and loveliest in the
world; everything which impairs the enjoyment of life was eliminated or
minimized; hucksters, pettifoggers and bigots were scarce as June
snowflakes; indentured servants, on their emancipation, were speedily
given the suffrage; it might almost be said that a man might do whatever
he pleased, within the limits of criminal law. Assuredly, personal liberty
was far greater at this epoch, in Virginia, than it is today in New York
City or Chicago. The instinct of the Virginians, in matters of governing,
was so far as possible to let themselves alone; the planters, in the
seclusion of their estates, were practically subject to no law but their
own pleasure. There was probably no place in the civilized world where so
much intelligent happiness was to be had as in Virginia during the years
immediately preceding the Restoration.

What would have been the political result had the absence of all
artificial pressure indefinitely continued? Two tendencies were
observable, working, apparently, in opposite directions. On one side were
the planters, many of them aristocratic by origin as well as by
circumstance; who lived in affluence, were friendly to the established
church, enjoyed a liberal education, and naturally assumed the reins of
power. The law which gave fifty acres of land to the settler who imported
an emigrant, while it made for the enlargement of estates, created also a
large number of tenants and dependants, who would be likely to support
their patrons and proprietors, who exercised so much control over their
welfare. These dependants found the conditions of existence comfortable,
and even after they had become their own masters, they would be likely to
consult the wishes of the men who had been the occasion of their good
fortune. Neither education nor religious instruction were so readily
obtainable as to threaten to render such a class discontented with their
condition by opening to them hitherto unknown gates of advantage; and the
suffrage, when by ownership of private property they had qualified
themselves to exercise it, would at once appease their independent
instincts, and at the same time make them willing, in using it, to follow
the lead or suggestion of men so superior to them in intelligence and in
political sagacity. From this standpoint, then, it seemed probable that a
self-governing community of the special kind existing in Virginia would
drift toward an aristocratic form of rule.

But the matter could be regarded in another way. Free suffrage is a power
having a principle of life within itself; it creates in the mind that
which did not before exist, and educates its possessor first by prompting
him to ask himself of what improvement his condition is susceptible, and
then by forcing him to review his desire by the light of its realization
--by practical experience of its effects, in other words: a method whose
teachings are more thorough and convincing than any school or college is
able to supply. The use of the ballot, in short, as a means of instruction
in the problems of government, takes the place of anything else; it will
of itself build up a people both capable of conducting their own affairs,
and resolved to do so. The plebeians of Virginia, therefore, who began by
being poor and ignorant emigrants, or indentured servants, to whom the
planters accorded such privileges because it had never occurred to them
that a plebeian can ever become anything else--these men, unconsciously to
themselves, perhaps, were on the road which leads to democracy. The time
would come when they would cease to follow the lead of the planters; when
their interests and the planters' would clash. In that collision, their
numbers would give them the victory. With a similar community planted in
the old world, such might not be the issue; the strong influence of
tradition would combat it, and the surrounding pressure of settled
countries, which offered no escape or asylum for the man of radical ideas.
But the boundaries of Virginia were the untrammeled wilderness; any man
who could not have his will in the colony had this limitless expanse at
his disposal; there could be no finality for him in the decrees of
assemblies, if he possessed the courage of his convictions in sufficient
measure to make him match himself against the red man, and be independent
not only of any special form of society, but of society itself. The
consciousness of this would hearten him to entertain free thoughts, and to
strive for their embodiment. It was partly this, no doubt, which, in the
Seventeenth Century, drove hundreds of Ishmaels into the interior, where
they became the Daniel Boones and the Davy Crocketts of legend and
romance. So, although Virginia was as little likely as any of the colonies
to breed a democracy, yet even there it was a more than possible outcome
of the situation, even with no outside stimulus. But the old world,
because it desired the oppression of America, was to become the immediate
agent of its emancipation.

There was rejoicing in Virginia when Charles II. acceded to power; on the
part of the planters, because they saw opportunity for political
distinction; on the part of the plebeians, as the expression of a loyalty
to kingship which centuries had made instinctive in them. Berkeley,
putting himself in line with the predominant feeling, summoned the
assembly in the name of the king, thus announcing without rebuke the
termination of the era of self-government. The members who were elected
were mostly royalists. They met in 1661. It was found that the Navigation
Acts, which had been a dead letter ever since their passage, were to be
revived in full force; and the increase of the colony in the meanwhile
made them more than ever unwelcome. The exports were much larger than
before, and unless the colony could have a free market for them the
profits must be materially lessened. And again, since England was the only
country from which the Virginian could purchase supplies, her merchants
could charge him what they pleased. This was galling alike to royalists
and roundheads in Virginia, and quickly healed the breach, such as it was,
between the parties. Charles's true policy would have been to widen the
gulf between them; instead of that, he forced them into each other's arms.
It was determined to send Berkeley to England to ask relief; he accepted
the commission, but his sympathies were not with the colonists, and he
obtained nothing. Evidently, there could be no relief but in independence,
and it was still a hundred years too early for that. The exasperation
which this state of things produced in the great landowners did more for
the cause of democracy than could decades of peaceful evolution. But the
colonists could no longer have things their own way. Liberal laws were
repealed, and intolerance and oppression took their place. Heretics were
persecuted; the power of the church in civil affairs was increased; and
fines and taxes on the industry of the colony were wanton and excessive.
The king of England directly ruled Virginia. The people were forced to pay
Berkeley a thousand pounds sterling as his salary, and he declared he
ought to get three times as much even as that. His true character was
beginning to appear. The judges were appointed by the king, and the
license thus given them resulted in a petty despotism; when an official
wanted money, he caused a tax to be levied for the amount. Appeals were
vain, and ere long were prohibited. The assembly, partisans of the king,
declared themselves permanent, so that all chance for the people to be
better represented was gone, and as the members fixed their own pay, and
fixed it at a preposterous figure, the colony began to groan in earnest.
But worse was to come. The suffrage was restricted to freeholders and
householders, and at a stroke, all but a fraction of the colonists were
deprived of any voice in their own government. The spread of education,
never adequate, was stopped altogether. "I thank God there are no free
schools nor printing," Sir William Berkeley was able to say, "and I hope
we shall not have, these hundred years; for learning has brought
disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has
divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from
both!" This was a succinct and full formulation of the spirit which has
ever tended to make the earth a hell for its inhabitants. "The ministers,"
added the governor, "should pray oftener, and preach less." But he spake
in all solemnity; there was not the ghost of a sense of humor in his whole
insufferable carcass.

The downward course was not to stop here. Charles, with the
freehandedness of a highwayman, presented two of his favorites, in 1673,
for a term of one and thirty years, with the entire colony! This act
stirred even the soddenness of the legislature. At the time of their
election, a dozen years before, they had been royalists indeed, but men of
honor, intending the good of the colony; and had tried, as we saw, to stop
the enforcement of the Navigation Acts. But when they discovered that they
could continue themselves in office indefinitely, with such salary as they
chose to demand, they soon became indifferent about the Navigation Acts,
or anything else which respected the welfare and happiness of their
fellows. Let the common folk do the work, and the better sort enjoy the
proceeds: that was the true and only respectable arrangement. We may say
that it sounds like a return to the dark ages; but perhaps if we enter
into our closets and question ourselves closely, we shall find that
precisely the same principles for which Berkeley and his assembly stood in
1673, are both avowed and carried into effect in this same country, in the
very year of grace which is now passing over us. A nation, even in
America, takes a great deal of teaching.

But the generosity of Charles startled the assembly out of their porcine
indifference, for it threatened to bring to bear upon them the same
practices by which they had destroyed the happiness of the colony. If the
king had given over to these two men all sovereignty in Virginia, what was
to prevent these gentlemen from dissolving the assembly, who had become,
as it were, incorporate with their seats, and had hoped to die in them--
and ruling the country and them without any legislative medium whatever?
Accordingly, with gruntings of dismay, they chose three agents to sail
forthwith to England, and expostulate with the merry monarch. The
expostulation was couched in the most servile terms, as of men who love to
be kicked, but hope to live, if only to be kicked again. Might the colony,
they concluded, be permitted to buy itself out of the hands of its new
owners, at their own price? And might the people of Virginia be free from
any tax not approved by their assembly? That was the sum of their petition.

The king let his lawyers talk over the matter, and, when they reported
favorably, good-naturedly said, "So let it be, then!" and permitted a
charter to be drawn up. But before the broad seal could be affixed to it
he altered his mind, for causes satisfactory to him, and the envoys were
sent home, poorer than they came. But before relating what awaited them
there, we must advert briefly to the doings of George Calvert, Lord
Baltimore in the Irish peerage, in his new country of Maryland.

CHAPTER SIXTH

CATHOLIC, PHILOSOPHER, AND REBEL

The first Lord Baltimore, whose family name was Calvert, was a
Yorkshireman, born at the town of Kipling in 1580. He entered Parliament
in his thirtieth year, and was James's Secretary of State ten years later.
He was a man of large, tranquil nature, philosophic, charitable, loving
peace; but these qualities were fused by a concrete tendency of thought,
which made him a man of action, and determined that action in the
direction of practical schemes of benevolence. The contemporary interest
in America as a possible arena of enterprise and Mecca of religious and
political dissenters, attracted his sympathetic attention; and when, in
1625, being then five-and-forty years of age, he found in the Roman
Catholic communion a refuge from the clamor of warring sects, and as an
immediate consequence tendered his resignation as secretary to the head of
the Church of England, he found himself with leisure to put his designs in
execution. He had, upon his conversion, been raised to the rank of Baron
Baltimore in the peerage of Ireland; and his change of faith in no degree
forfeited him the favor of the king. When therefore he asked for a charter
to found a colony in Avalon, in Newfoundland, it was at once granted, and
the colony was sent out; but his visits to it in 1627 and 1629 convinced
him that the climate was too inclement for his purposes, and he requested
that it might be transferred to the northern parts of Virginia, which he
had visited on his way to England. This too was permitted; but before the
new charter had been sealed Lord Baltimore died. The patent thereupon
passed to his son Cecil, who was also a Catholic. He devoted his life to
carrying out his father's designs. The characters of the two men were, in
their larger elements, not dissimilar; and the sequel showed that colonial
enterprise could be better achieved by one man of kindly and liberal
disposition, and persistent resolve, than by a corporation, some of whose
members were sure to thwart the wishes of others. Conditions of wider
scope than the settlement of Maryland obstructed and delayed its
proprietor's plans; conflicts and changes of government in England, and
jealousy and violence on the part of Virginia, had their influence; but
this quiet, benign, resolute young man (who was but seven-and-twenty when
the grant made him sovereign of a kingdom) never lost his temper or
swerved from his aim: overcame, apparently without an effort, the
disabilities which might have been expected to hamper the professor of a
faith as little consonant with the creed of the two Charleses as of
Cromwell; was as well regarded, politically, by cavaliers as by
roundheads; and finally established his ownership and control of his
heritage, and, after a beneficent rule of over forty years, died in peace
and honor with his people and the world. The story of colonial Maryland
has a flavor of its own, and throws still further light on the subject of
popular self-government--the source and solution of American history.

The idea of the Baltimores, as outlined in their charter, and followed in
their practice, was to try the experiment of a democratic monarchy. They
would found a state the people of which should enjoy all the freedom of
action and thought that sane and well-disposed persons can desire, within
the boundaries of their personal concerns; they should not be meddled
with; each man's home should be his castle; they should say what taxes
should be collected, and what civil officers should attend to their
collective affairs. They should be like passengers on a ship, free to
sleep or wake, sit or walk, speak or be mute, eat or fast, as they
pleased: do anything in fact except scuttle the ship or cut the rigging
--or ordain to what port she should steer, or what course the helmsman
should lay. Matters of high policy, in other words, should be the care of
the proprietor; everything less than that, broadly speaking, should be
left to the colonists themselves. The proprietor could not get as close to
their personal needs as they could: and they, preoccupied with private
interests, could not see so far and wide as he could. If then it were
arranged that they should be afforded every facility and encouragement to
make their wants known: and if it were guaranteed that he would adopt
every means that experience, wisdom and good-will suggested to gratify
those wants: what more could mortal man ask? There was nothing abnormal in
the idea. The principle is the same as that on which the Creator has
placed man in nature: man is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases;
only, he must adapt himself to the law of gravitation, to the resistance
of matter, to hot and cold, wet and dry, and to the other impersonal
necessities by which the material universe is conditioned. The control of
these natural laws, as they are called, could not advantageously be given
in charge to man; even had he the brains to manage them, he could not
spare the time from his immediate concerns. He is well content,
accordingly, to leave them to the Power that put him where he is; and he
does not feel his independence infringed upon in so doing. When his little
business goes wrong, however, he can petition his Creator to help him out:
or, what amounts to the same thing, he can find out in what respect he has
failed to conform to the laws of nature, and, by returning into harmony
with them, insure himself success. What the Creator was to mankind at
large, Lord Baltimore proposed to be to his colony; and, following this
supreme example, and binding himself to place the welfare of his people
before all other considerations, how could he make a mistake?

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